As set forth in the book entitled Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, written by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold, the idea of cultivating a state of mind while awake for the purpose of carrying it into a dream state as a means of inducing lucid dreams, has been used by Tibetan Buddhists for more than a thousand years. However as recently as the late 1970's, experts were convinced that dreaming with consciousness that you were dreaming was a contradiction in terms and therefore impossible. At this recent time Stephen LaBerge began his Ph.D. studies of lucid dreams at Stanford University to establish proof that lucid dreaming was real, by obtaining evidence from the dream world that a person knew he or she was dreaming during sleep.
During his studies, he, with the assistance of other persons, has developed experimental testing equipment for helping him and other persons to obtain such evidence from the dream world. In so doing, the developed experimental testing equipment, in many embodiments, has also been designed and built to help persons who are lucid dreamers, or wish to try to become lucid dreamers, to have lucid dreams and to have them more often and to have them more effectively. These lucid dreamers are referred to as being Oneironauts.
Also other persons have developed equipment, such as Keith M. T. Hearne who illustrated and described his respiratory measuring device in his U.S. Pat. No. 4,420,001 of 1983. His device sensed temperature changes of a person's respiration in his or her breathing passageway, or in airflows to and from his or her breathing passageway. Thermistors were used, in an electrical circuit, to sense the temperature changes of the person's respiration. When the rate of these temperature changes reached a high predetermined level, the signals created in the electrical circuit initiated an audible sound, either to help arouse a sleeping person from an unpleasant dream by awaking them or to help them enter into a lucid dream state.
At this time, a number of different techniques have been used to monitor sleep, in both the quiet phase and active phase, the latter also being called the rapid eye movement phase of sleep and referred to as REM sleep. These techniques include applications of: electrodes for EEG, ECG and EMG; infra-red sensing; and respiration measurement with strain-gauges or thermistors. Among these techniques, Stephen LaBerge and those helping him sought a method to reliably sense the presence of REM sleep, so that a device could automatically signal to a sleeper that he or she is dreaming. The requirements for such a device were portability, ease of use, low cost, and above all reliability and the successful induction of lucid dreams, which are those dreams wherein one is aware that one is dreaming.